Topic: Ivan Gasparovic

Ivan Gašparovič (born March 27, 1941) is a Slovak politician and law professor who has been the President of Slovakia since June 15, 2004. He is also the first Slovak president to be re-elected.

Gašparovič was born in Poltár, near Lučenec and Banská Bystrica in present day south-central Slovakia, that time in the first Slovak Republic. His father, Vladimir Gašparović, emigrated to Slovakia from Croatia at the end of World War I and was a teacher at a (secondary school) in Bratislava, and at one point its Headmaster.

Gašparovič studied at the Law Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava, which is the main university in Slovakia, from 1959 to 1964. He worked in the District Prosecutor's Office of the district of Martin (1965-66), then became a Prosecutor at the Municipal Prosecutor's Office of Bratislava (1966-68). In 1968, he joined the Communist Party of Slovakia, supposedly to support Alexander Dubček's reforms, but he was expelled from the party after the Warsaw Pact invasion in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (see History of Czechoslovakia).